As an American resident on these shores, I must confess that I had to look up just who Houblon and Boulton were (unaccountably, they did not feature in the Life in the UK test). I also had to check my maths. As Fry is eased out, Austen will be eased in, guaranteeing that there will always be one woman out of six symbolic figures - 16%. And that's about right.

As everyone knows, women are supposed to make up 20% of representative bodies. We account for roughly 20% of people on boards and 20% of people in parliament (in the US Senate we hold 20% of the seats, a proportion right in line with the Bank of England's base rate). Women also comprise 20% of the professoriate in Britain and Europe, there were 20 women among the Fortune 500 bosses, and on average women earn 20% less than men. So it's easy to see why King was confident he could smooth our ruffled feathers. We'll have our statutory token female.

As a literature professor, I am naturally delighted to hear Austen is quietly waiting in the wings, for that's always been her style. Nothing too pushy or presumptuous; with her nice manners, gentle wit and quintessential British irony, Austen was a token female before we even had token females. A prototoken, if you will.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that "token" has meant "pro forma; (purely) symbolic; constituting a gesture (only); minimal, nominal, perfunctory" since about 1915, which is when the syllabus of modern English literature began to be consolidated in British and American universities.

Jane Austen was never included in the literary canon in a purely symbolic or perfunctory way, of course. Her novels have always been much admired, even by people who don't much admire books by women. She was not a token female because it never even occurred to the men teaching literature that such a thing might be necessary or desirable. Indeed, it often never occurred to them that she was female. A Walton Litz - a fine literary scholar who, in 1965, wrote an influential book about Austen subtitled A Study of Her Artistic Development - once told a friend of mine that he never thought for a moment while composing his book about the fact that Austen was a woman. It never crossed his mind.

For literary scholars, Austen has always been the exception who proved the rule. This is such a familiar idea that it has its own phrase: Austen's exceptionalism has been debated for decades by scholars who argue that she was admitted into the all-boys' club because her books were essentially conservative, placatory, invested in maintaining the status quo. Such an interpretation entirely overlooks her subversive energy, the challenging effects of her irony, but that's no matter.

Austen has long been used as a token payment, a small proportion of the sum of respect due to the achievement of women in our culture. To have her making another nominal payment on behalf of us all is just as it should be. In that sense, Jane Austen has always been on the money.